March 28, 2011

The Popularity of Data Analysis Software: R vs SAS vs SPSS

As posted on KDDnuggets. A paper written by Robert A. Muenchen.

Among more interesting observations

  • R has the largest number of email discussions (by 2-to-1 margin), followed by Stata and SAS
  • the number of R packages published on CRAN continues to grow exponentially
  • R is leading in blogs (170), with only 31 blogs for 2nd place SAS
  • However, jobs mentioned SAS and SPSS have a big lead over jobs mentioning R

March 21, 2011

2nd Survey on Analytics for Fundraising

The 2nd Survey on Analytics for Fundraising is here! The goal of this survey is to better understand our industry, our colleagues, and trends in analysis and software.

All results will be public. Anyone can request a raw file of the results yourself for your own data-mining!

Please feel free to send a link of this survey to anyone you feel has something to share. 

The Last 12 Months of DonorCast Newswatch Posts Visualized in Many Eyes

March 15, 2011

Hear me on AFP/wiley Radio with Ted Hart noon EST today http://bit.ly/enkGmO

AFP/ Wiley Radio The Nonprofit Coach w/ Ted Hart (Joshua M. Birkholz - Fundraising Analytics Expert) Noon EST Today, March 15, 2011

Click to join

March 11, 2011

Big Data mining: Who owns your social network data?

An attractive application of Hadoop and other Big Data technologies is to analyze users' social activities, sometimes without their express knowledge

By Paul Krill | InfoWorld

The now-trendy concept of Big Data usually implies ever-growing hordes of data, including unstructured info posted on Facebook and Twitter, and ways of gleaning intelligence from all of it to create business opportunities. The concept, however, also carries with it risks for anyone opening up about themselves on the Internet and raises questions about who exactly owns all this data.

Big Data is associated with technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing platform and is prompting some technology companies, including IBM, to make major acquisitions. But the term "Big Data," claims GigaOm analyst Derrick Harris, is a bit of a misnomer; it's really about data from different sources, including social networks and even cell phones. "It's coming from sensors, it's coming from computers, it's coming from the Web," he says.

Read more

Statistics in golf can yield great benefits

Following up on our sports-related posts a few months back, the golf fan in me loved this article. Now I can tell my wife I have to watch golf for work.

In response to such trends, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference held the first Golf Analytics panel in the conference's 5-year history to discuss potential applications of advanced statistical analysis in golf. We've seen numbers-crunchers change baseball, basketball, and football. Golf could be next.